Toward a genealogy of planning: zoning and the Welfare State

This paper explores the conceptual and instrumental link between modern urban planning and the Welfare State. Both are defined by the way in which professionals understand social problems and formulate practical solutions to them. In modern urban planning, at least as practised in the US until the 1960s, the unit of analysis is the individual or collective need and the elementary tool of intervention is the regulatory standard. In order to understand the connection between planning and modernity, traditional history must be complemented by genealogy, a mode of analysis that sheds light on the historical construction of theories and institutions and that focuses our attention on basic habits of thought and action.